Enterprises increasingly have a need to store large amounts of data including in archive storage systems, media content repositories, and other large scale web data stores, for example. With respect to archival storage by way of example, enterprises often utilize disk-based storage devices, tape-based storage devices, and/or other hardware storage devices located in the enterprise data center or storage network to store objects that include unstructured data, as well as replicas of the objects.
In some implementations, hardware solutions having various capabilities with respect to response speed or storage size, for example, are utilized as tiers for storing data having various associated requirements or usage. For example, data more likely to be retrieved often may be stored in relatively fast disk-based storage devices and, conversely, data unlikely to be retrieved often may be stored in relatively slow tape-based storage devices. Many other permutations of storage devices are used for tiered storage of various types of data according to policies established by enterprise data storage system administrators.
However, the storage devices that comprise enterprise storage networks have an associated cost of ownership and operation that may be undesirable for some enterprises for purposes of satisfying certain aspects of their storage requirements. The cost of operation can include the cost of manual data management and associated increased likelihood of introducing errors. The storage device hardware ownership and operational cost can be particularly undesirable when unaligned with the variable data storage requirements of some enterprises. Additionally, data storage system and associated hardware storage devices do not provide sufficient flexibility or scalability currently desired by many enterprises.